Well, according to Pamela Hudson, the medical center's associate director of administration, their jobs are safe. In fact, she says that with such a massive new hospital, hiring in some departments is on the rise. The robots are about supplementing current jobs, she says, not eliminating them. "It would be a travesty for us to hire more techs who specialize in instrumentation but all they're doing is running around delivering trays," Hudson says. "That's not the best use of their skills--that's not a real job satisfier." As an added perk, she says, if staffers aren't pushing around huge carts, they're not straining themselves or mowing down their colleagues.

As for deference:

"We had to train on a lot of robot etiquette, you know," says operations director Brian Herriot as we walk the halls in search of Tugs, aided by a laptop that tracks their movements. "Which is, we train them to treat a robot like your grandma, and she's in the hospital in a wheel chair. If something's in their way, just move it aside, don't go stand in front of them." ...

It may have an adult voice, but Tug has a childlike air, even though in this hospital you're supposed to treat it like a wheelchair-bound old lady. It's just so innocent, so earnest, and at times, a bit helpless. If there's enough stuff blocking its way in a corridor, for instance, it can't reroute around the obstruction.

This happened to the Tug we were trailing in pediatrics. "Oh, something's in its way!" a woman in scrubs says with an expression like she herself had ruined the robot's day. She tries moving the wheeled contraption but it won't budge. "Uh, oh!" She shoves on it some more and finally gets it to move. "Go, Tug, go!" she exclaims as the robot, true to its programming, continues down the hall.

George Johnson writes about a recent study that concluded that most cancer is caused by random mutations rather than environment or heredity. This is good news and bad news: your behavior makes less difference than you think. Smoking is obviously bad, but otherwise your behavior and genes only have a minority effect on your cancer risk.

Some of these genetic misprints are caused by outside agents, chemical or biological, especially in parts of the body -- the skin, the lungs and the digestive tract -- most exposed to the ravages of the world. But millions every second occur purely by chance -- random, spontaneous glitches that may be the most pervasive carcinogen of all.

It's a truth that grates against our deepest nature. That was clear earlier this month when a paper in Science on the prominent role of "bad luck" and cancer caused an outbreak of despair, outrage and, ultimately, disbelief.

The most intemperate of this backlash -- mini-screeds on Twitter and hit-and-run comments on the web -- suggested that the authors, Cristian Tomasetti and Bert Vogelstein of Johns Hopkins University, must be apologists for chemical companies or the processed food industry. In fact, their study was underwritten by nonprofit cancer foundations and grants from the National Institutes of Health. In some people's minds, those were just part of the plot.

What psychologists call apophenia -- the human tendency to see connections and patterns that are not really there -- gives rise to conspiracy theories. It is also at work, though usually in a milder form, in our perceptions about cancer and our revulsion to randomness.

You can view cancer like a slow-motion car crash: most of the time it's not your fault, and it really sucks. Unlike a fatal car crash, cancer usually gives you time to see your loved ones.

Suppose, today, that the robots and smart machines of the Second Economy are only capable of doing the work of a person of average intelligence - that is, an IQ of 100. Imagine that the technology in those machines continues to improve at the current rate. Suppose further that this rate of technological progress raises the IQ of these machines by 1.5 points per year. By 2025 these machines will have an IQ greater than 90% of the U.S. population. That 15 point increase in IQ over ten years would put another 50 million jobs within reach of smart machines.

Impossible? In fact, the vanguard of those 115-point IQ machines is already here. In certain applications, the minds of highly educated MD's are no longer needed. In 2013, the FDA approved Johnson & Johnson's Sedasys machine, which delivers propofol to sedate patients without the need for an anesthesiologist. An emerging field in radiology is computer-aided diagnosis (CADx). And a recent study published by the Royal Society showed that computers performed more consistently in identifying radiolucency (the appearance of dark images) than radiologists almost by a factor of ten.

Politicians, economists, and scientists might debate these particular estimates, but to do so is to miss the larger point. Machine intelligence is already having a major effect on the value of work - and for major segments of the population, human value is now being set by the cost of equivalent machine intelligence.

The shift to automation will be a growing challenge for capitalism as the dependent class grows.

Greenwald believes that leaked documents will induce Silicon Valley to clean up its act. But given the systemic forces at work, Silicon Valley will likely continue to consort with spies. In light of wage cartels, slave labor and wanton tax avoidance, it should be clear that high-tech companies have absolutely no shame at all. Like a textbook psychopath, most corporate entities really care about one thing only: profit. Caught in bed with the intelligence services, they'll simply keep on selling more lies.

Why should they clean up their act when it's cheaper and more profitable to sell snake oil to rubes? In the C-suites of Silicon Valley managing bad publicity is largely a matter of cleverly devised public relations. Having beguiled their users with a newly minted "encryption everywhere" sales pitch they will return to their old ways. High-tech executives, you see, want to have their cake and eat it too. People raking in billions are used to getting what they want: patronize the unwashed masses with talk of improved security and simultaneously maintain their links to their brethren in the intelligence services.

This mission is a colossal achievement. Millions of us have been watching Philae's heart-stopping journey. Everyone in this country should be proud of Dr Taylor and his colleagues, and he has every right to let his feelings show.

Except, of course, that he wasn't crying with relief. He wasn't weeping with sheer excitement at this interstellar rendezvous. I am afraid he was crying because he felt he had sinned. He was overcome with guilt and shame for wearing what some people decided was an "inappropriate" shirt on television. "I have made a big mistake," he said brokenly. "I have offended people and I am sorry about this."

I watched that clip of Dr Taylor's apology - at the moment of his supreme professional triumph - and I felt the red mist come down. It was like something from the show trials of Stalin, or from the sobbing testimony of the enemies of Kim Il-sung, before they were taken away and shot. It was like a scene from Mao's cultural revolution when weeping intellectuals were forced to confess their crimes against the people.

Why was he forced into this humiliation? Because he was subjected to an unrelenting tweetstorm of abuse. He was bombarded across the internet with a hurtling dustcloud of hate, orchestrated by lobby groups and politically correct media organisations.

And so I want, naturally, to defend this blameless man. And as for all those who have monstered him and convicted him in the kangaroo court of the web - they should all be ashamed of themselves.

Let's celebrate the brilliance of Dr. Taylor and the rest of the Philae team and reserve our faux outrage for really offensive shirts.

To avoid sickness we're all taught to wash our hands, cover our mouths when we cough or sneeze, and avoid touching our face. However, for most of my life I viewed the prospect of getting sick as a binary state: either I caught something or I didn't. As I got older I considered that I might get less sick if I reduce my exposure to infected fluids, even if I couldn't avoid getting sick entirely. I read about attenuated vaccines that contained live viruses but didn't make their recipients sick (usually). As I investigated further, I finally came across a description of viral load and the puzzle pieces fell into place. Why hadn't anyone told me about this concept as a kid? Maybe most people don't know that infections aren't binary! So what is viral load?

Viral load, also known as viral burden, viral titre or viral titer, is a measure of the severity of an active viral infection, and can be calculated by estimating the live amount of virus in an involved body fluid.

Basically, it's how many copies of a virus you've got in your body: your infection (and immune response) is worse if you've got more of the virus. Your kid gives you a lot of virus copies when she sneezes into your open eyes, and you're likely to get sick more severely and more quickly. This is significant especially as a parent because it's impossible to avoid contamination from a sick kid completely, but you can reduce the severity of your eventual sickness if you work to minimize your viral load.

The relatively swift recoveries of Vinson and Pham might also be attributed to their personal protective equipment (PPE) they were wearing when they treated Duncan.

While some nurses at the Texas hospital reportedly complained about PPE that left their necks exposed, at least Vinson was suited up.

"She was wearing personal protective equipment during the care of her patient in Dallas, and therefore it is quite likely that the amount of virus she was exposed to was substantially less than what we see in patients who get infected in less developed countries," Ribner said.

"And we also know that the higher the viral load that you get infected with, the more severe your disease is likely to be."

"Infection" is a continuum. Even when you can't avoid exposure entirely, you can minimize the severity of your illness by minimizing your viral load.

Marine Corps Gen. John Kelly, commander of the U.S. Southern Command, predicted last week that the Ebola virus will not be contained in West Africa, and if infected people flee those countries and spread the disease to Central and South America, it could cause "mass migration into the United States" of those seeking treatment.

"If it breaks out, it's literally, 'Katie bar the door,' and there will be mass migration into the United States," Kelly said in remarks to the National Defense University on Tuesday. "They will run away from Ebola, or if they suspect they are infected, they will try to get to the United States for treatment.

Ebola experts agree that we don't know enough about the virus to guarantee that it only spreads via close contact with bodily fluids and that asymptomatic carriers are non-infectious.

Dr. Philip K. Russell, a virologist who oversaw Ebola research while heading the U.S. Army's Medical Research and Development Command, and who later led the government's massive stockpiling of smallpox vaccine after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, also said much was still to be learned. "Being dogmatic is, I think, ill-advised, because there are too many unknowns here." ...

"I see the reasons to dampen down public fears," Russell said. "But scientifically, we're in the middle of the first experiment of multiple, serial passages of Ebola virus in man.... God knows what this virus is going to look like. I don't." ...

Skinner of the CDC, who cited the Peters-led study as the most extensive of Ebola's transmissibility, said that while the evidence "is really overwhelming" that people are most at risk when they touch either those who are sick or such a person's vomit, blood or diarrhea, "we can never say never" about spread through close-range coughing or sneezing.

In my opinion, we need to be much more aggressive in isolating exposed people. We obviously need to care for them as well as we can, but we can't let our compassion put the whole population at risk. Near the apartment complexes where the Dallas patient lived government officials are worrying more about "civil rights" than about containing the epidemic.

Vickery Meadow, a crush of low-income apartment complexes just a short drive from some of Dallas's toniest neighborhoods, appeared calm on Tuesday. Women in traditional Muslim head coverings, mothers carrying children and workers headed to the bus stop walked along the road next to The Ivy apartments, where Duncan had stayed.

But some tensions have surfaced.

Dallas City Councilwoman Jennifer Staubach Gates said three residents of Vickery Meadow reported that their employers sent them away from work out of fear that they could be carrying the virus. Gates said Tuesday that she had contacted a lawyer to help those men.

The city has also enlisted doctors to explain Ebola to neighborhood residents and assure them that they are safe, Gates said. Vickery Meadow is home to thousands of immigrants from Afghanistan to Mexico, many of whom don't speak English.

But are they safe? That's not clear at all. I think our leaders and citizens should be a little less starry-eyed and a little more paranoid.

"Right now, the base number is 18 people, and that could increase," he said. Thompson said more details are expected by Thursday afternoon. The number includes five students at four schools, Dallas school district Superintendent Mike Miles said. ...

He urged parents to keep their children in school, but some were wary. ...

"Since none of the students had symptoms, I'm pretty confident that none of the kids were exposed," Miles said.

The superintendent is "pretty confident" that your kid won't get Ebola at school. Any parent who relies on that is a fool. I'll believe it when I see the superintendent and President Obama playing with the exposed kids. It's far better for your kid to miss a few weeks or a month of school than to risk exposure to Ebola.

The genomic sequencing also offers hints as to how the Ebola "Zaire" strain at the heart of the current outbreak -- one of five types of Ebola virus known to infect humans -- likely ended up in West Africa in the first place. Researchers said the data suggests that the virus spread from an animal host, possibly bats, and that diverged around 2004 from an Ebola strain in central Africa, where previous outbreaks have occurred.

Dogs in one community in Liberia are reportedly eating the remains of dead Ebola victims lying on the streets. ...

Dr. Stephen Korsman of the University of Cape Town's medical virology division tells News 24 that dogs can be infected with the Ebola virus but that "infections appear to be asymptomatic."
"This means that dogs won't get sick, but they still could carry a potential risk through licking or biting," Korsman explained to News 24.

Now you've created a native reservoir of Ebola in your target area that will periodically break out and infect humans and might be impossible to eradicate.

Thanks to the shoddy drafting of the Obamacare law the DC federal appeals court has ruled that it's illegal to subsidize healthcare plans bought through the federal exchange. The law only authorizes subsidies for plans bought through state exchanges, not through the federal exchange that was created for states that decided not to create exchanges of their own. Obviously this was not the intent of the law, and under normal circumstances Congress would simply pass an update to the law to remove any grounds for controversy. Of course that's impossible due to the politics surrounding Obamacare, and now the whole scheme may be doomed unless the courts decide to apply the law as intended rather than as written. Which these judges, at least, have refused to do.

The 2-1 ruling said such subsidies can be granted only to people who bought insurance in an Obamacare exchange run by an individual state or the District of Columbia--not on the federally run exchange HealthCare.gov. The ruling relied on a close reading of language in the Affordable Care Act.

"Section 36B plainly makes subsidies available in the Exchanges established by states," wrote Senior Circuit Judge Raymond Randolph in his majority opinion in the case known as Halbig v. Burwell, where he was joined by Judge Thomas Griffith.

"We reach this conclusion, frankly, with reluctance. At least until states that wish to can set up their own Exchanges, our ruling will likely have significant consequences both for millions of individuals receiving tax credits through federal Exchanges and for health insurance markets more broadly."

Obviously I think it would be best for the country for the whole law to collapse. The impossibility of properly fixing this "technical error" in the law is yet another example of how badly things can go when one party forces a bill into law against the will of the citizenry and with no support from the other party. Congress can't patch this mistake, and the courts shouldn't clean up Congress' mess.

It looks like an audacious plan to recover use of a 36-year-old satellite has ultimately failed as ISEE-3's thrusters have stopped responding to commands. Still, it's awesome that the attempt was made, and even cooler than it was done by a group of enthusiasts rather than a government team.

A team of space enthusiasts recently got permission from NASA to reconnect with the old spacecraft as it approached Earth. The idea was to put it on a new course so that it wouldn't just fly past. Instead, it would be commanded to go to a new orbit and join younger satellites in monitoring space weather.

On Tuesday, and then again Wednesday, the volunteer group sent commands to fire ISEE-3's engines again and again.

"And our first series of burns, we thought went OK," says Keith Cowing, a former NASA guy who is one of the leaders of the volunteer group -- the ISEE-3 Reboot Project. "And then when we went to the second set, pretty much nothing happened. And we tried it again, and nothing happened."

Jean-Baptiste Quéru describes the depth and complexity of what happens when you visit a website -- there's a lot more going on that most people realize. I'll quote the very first bit, but read the rest if you're interested in getting a glimpse of the magic behind our technology. As Quéru writes, no one person or company can fully comprehend it.

You just went to the Google home page.

Simple, isn't it?

What just actually happened?

Well, when you know a bit of about how browsers work, it's not quite that simple. You've just put into play HTTP, HTML, CSS, ECMAscript, and more. Those are actually such incredibly complex technologies that they'll make any engineer dizzy if they think about them too much, and such that no single company can deal with that entire complexity.

Roll Call has broken the news that the CBO has announced that it can no longer project the costs of Obamacare. All the CBO estimates for Obamacare over the past five years have turned out to be nonsense. Short version: President Obama has made so many unilateral modifications to the law that no one can figure out what the heck is going on anymore.

In its latest report on the law, the Congressional Budget Office said it is no longer possible to assess the overall fiscal impact of the law. That conclusion came as a surprise to some fiscal experts in Washington and is drawing concern. And without a clear picture of the law's overall financing, it could make it politically easier to continue delaying pieces of it, including revenue raisers, because any resulting cost increases might be hidden.

Charles Blahous, a senior research fellow at George Mason University's free market-oriented Mercatus Center, calls the CBO's inability to estimate the net effect of the law "a real problem."

"The ACA's financing provisions were assumed to be effective so as to get a favorable score out of CBO upon enactment, but no one is keeping track of whether they're being enforced," says Blahous, a public trustee for Social Security and Medicare. "We receive occasional updates on the gross costs of the law, but none on whether the previously projected savings provisions are producing what was originally projected."

As a result, Blahous says, "there's no barrier to continually rolling back the financing mechanisms without the effect on the ACA's finances ever being fully disclosed."

I asked Buser where he thinks things stand now. "The number of studies carried out so far is simply too small to come to a conclusive answer, especially because there are so many dimensions to multitasking," he replied. "It is entirely possible that women are better at some kinds of multitasking but not at others, but so far there is very little evidence for any gender differences."

Ann Althouse asks why people like to believe that women are better than men at multitasking, and offers a few suggestions.

Who benefits? Is it female ego-boosting? Is it another trick of the patriarchy that hoodwinks women into doing the housework and child-rearing?

I think she's on to something. Other possibilities:

Perhaps women excel at tasks that are more commonly performed in parallel due to the nature of the tasks themselves.

Perhaps women excel at multitasking some highly visible tasks, and this observation bias leads people to believe that women excel at multitasking in general.

Perhaps women exert greater effort while multitasking in a real environment, while men only exert themselves while multitasking in an experimental environment.

It happens quickly--more quickly than you, being human, can fully process.

A front tire blows, and your autonomous SUV swerves. But rather than veering left, into the opposing lane of traffic, the robotic vehicle steers right. Brakes engage, the system tries to correct itself, but there's too much momentum. Like a cornball stunt in a bad action movie, you are over the cliff, in free fall.

Your robot, the one you paid good money for, has chosen to kill you. Better that, its collision-response algorithms decided, than a high-speed, head-on collision with a smaller, non-robotic compact. There were two people in that car, to your one. The math couldn't be simpler.

In my opinion, your robotic car should has customizable ethics options that let you, the owner, choose your priorities. If you want to protect your family above all else, then you should be able to select that and bear the legal consequences.

"Buy our car," jokes Michael Cahill, a law professor and vice dean at Brooklyn Law School, "but be aware that it might drive over a cliff rather than hit a car with two people."

Okay, so that was Cahill's tossed-out hypothetical, not mine. But as difficult as it would be to convince automakers to throw their own customers under the proverbial bus, or to force their hand with regulations, it might be the only option that shields them from widespread litigation. Because whatever they choose to do--kill the couple, or the driver, or randomly pick a target--these are ethical decisions being made ahead of time. As such, they could be far more vulnerable to lawsuits, says Cahill, as victims and their family members dissect and indict decisions that weren't made in the spur of the moment, "but far in advance, in the comfort of corporate offices."

In the absence of a universal standard for built-in, pre-collision ethics, superhuman cars could start to resemble supervillains, aiming for the elderly driver rather than the younger investment banker--the latter's family could potentially sue for considerably more lost wages. Or, less ghoulishly, the vehicle's designers could pick targets based solely on make and model of car. "Don't steer towards the Lexus," says Cahill. "If you have to hit something, you could program it hit a cheaper car, since the driver is more likely to have less money."

These questions seem futuristic, but our robots will be making a lot of split-second decisions for us based on the rules we set up in advance. We need to think about what those rules should be.

Once the leader in cybersecurity, Symantec has declared that "antivirus is dead", at least as a business model. This is obviously true, considering the proliferation of excellent free antivirus software. Antivirus is also pretty stale as a technology:

Ted Schlein, who helped create Symantec's first antivirus product, describes such software as "necessary but insufficient." As a partner at venture-capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Mr. Schlein invests in new cybersecurity companies that compete with Symantec.

Using antivirus software is like locking the door of your house. It's a smart thing to do, but it won't protect you if you expose yourself to danger in other ways.